After serving in World War II, Thul returned from Europe and joined his father Nick’s auto parts and repair enterprise. “We were doing manufacturing operations, we were doing engine rebuilding, and we were doing auto parts,” said Thul Auto Parts President Rick Thul. “After the war, things started growing quite a bit, and … it got too complicated to keep it all together.” The triad of separate enterprises was established in the early 1960s, and, although founder Nick Thul worked until “the day he died,” according to Rick, “My father (Frederick) and my uncle drove the business mostly through the engine rebuilding and the automotive sectors.”

John Aniunas, regional manager with Raybestos/Affinia, knew Thul for 40 years. He said Fred never stopped asking: Where does the future lie, and how do we stay ahead of that curve? “He had an insight of that metro market and how to compete and grow and service his customers extremely well,” Aniunas said. Thul’s dedication to the industry also was evidenced by his status as a founder of the New Jersey Automotive Wholesalers Association and his time as president of the Mid-Jersey Automotive Wholesalers Association. “His association … not only grew his business, but also helped develop other area companies,” Aniunas said.

Al Tobin, division sales manager at Champion Laboratories, echoed those sentiments. “He was always thinking before his time, and he was always trying to make his business better, along with all of his suppliers,” Tobin said. “Guys like Fred … were the leaders in the New York and New Jersey area that really helped guys like me come aboard and learn the business. They were great teachers.”

Rick Thul said that the business lessons he learned from his father, who retired in 1991, were the kind that last. “Quality was more important than just about anything else,” he said. “Quality lasts a lot longer than the value of a cheap price, and that was a legacy passed from my grandfather to all of us.”

Over the next decade and a half, Ken Miller led Brembo NA from a two-person operation to a 25-employee branch of the company, adding departments and entering the racing and high-performance market as well. Although he retired as president in the early 2000s, Miller continued consulting with the company and helped manage its aftermarket division.

Ken Miller is survived by his wife of 34 years Donna, son Brandon, and daughter Kendra.

A native of Cleveland, Bauman built his marketing reputation with food industry giants Nestle and Morton Salt, then served as CEO of foodservice equipment supplier C&K Manufacturing before joining Hickok to work with his older brother, Hickok President and CEO Bob Bauman. “Hickok, up until just prior to his coming on board, was very heavily selling to OEMs,” recalled Bob Bauman, who has been with the company for 45 years. “We were trying to broaden the base of our business, and we had a number of products we felt were applicable into the automotive aftermarket environment.”

Bob Bauman said his brother’s product marketing experience proved invaluable, even in an arena that was new to him. “He had to learn new players and all that, but the way the automotive aftermarket distribution systems work is identical to the way the food industry distribution systems work,” he said. Led by his efforts, Hickok — long known for its instrumentation in the aviation and locomotive industries — established itself as a “significant player” in the aftermarket, Bob Bauman noted, with automotive-related sales accounting for more than half of the company’s business.

SECO’s origins date back to a mail-order parts business Simmons founded while still working for his father’s electrical appliance repair business. As Graves notes on the SECO website, her father “began selling racing slicks and t-shirts out of a trailer he hauled to the (race) tracks.” The company grew into a warehouse distributor and a five-store chain of SECO Performance Centers.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Simmons got more and more involved in the industry. His Hall of Fame biography on the SEMA website notes that Simmons joined the association in 1969 and became a Performance Warehouse Association (PWA) area director in 1974. For two solid decades, Simmons was generous with his leadership and insight, serving three terms on the SEMA board of directors (1978-’82), holding his PWA directorship until 1991 and serving two terms each as PWA treasurer and national director. In 1993, he was given the PWA Pioneer Award, and SEMA inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2004.

Simmons also co-founded the AAM/Parts Pro group in the late 1980s. AAM President Tim Odom called Simmons a man of vision who recognized early on the value and importance of organizations like PWA and SEMA and who saw that investments in other parts of the industry come back to help individual businesses. “He wasn’t a self-centered businessman,” Odom said. “He was somebody who looked at the industry overall and knew that what would be good for the industry would be good for his business as well. It takes a person of vision to do that.”

At the same time, Odom complimented Simmons as a sharp horse trader, who knew how to deal and find opportunities and who never stopped conducting his business warmly and on a person-to-person level. “He knew how to make things happen,” Odom said. “He knew how to find deals and opportunities, and, within our group, he was respected as a negotiator. But, he did it all with a smile on his face.”

John Towle, executive director of PWA, knew Simmons for more than 40 years and the two shared a long-standing enthusiasm for drag racing. “I always found him to be just a genuine, honest, wonderful individual to do business with, and he was certainly a voice of the aftermarket,” Towle said. “There’s just not thousands of those kind of folks out there.”

Towle also spoke of Simmons’ ability to see and understand challenges and issues from all sides. “When you worked a program together, you always knew where John was coming from,” he said. “He could wear an association hat or an industry hat, and he could wear his own business hat. The industry was important to him — not just SECO itself.”

Inman’s three-decade career in the aftermarket included employment with battery maker Globe-Union and led him to Echlin in 1977, where he took the role of NAPA merchandising manager. In the early 1980s, Inman assumed the marketing manager position for ACC-special markets/national accounts and was instrumental in the launch of Echlin’s consumer products group, Auto-Tune. “He was very energetic and had a positive attitude all the time,” recalled Tom Miller, vice president of sales and marketing at Avon Lake, OH-based Design Engineering, who worked with Inman for almost 10 years at Echlin. “He had good business sense and was a friendly guy.”

Inman left Echlin in 1986 and put the aftermarket behind him, returning to his childhood state of Arizona to go into business for himself.

“Dick Wells was one of those people in whom the passion for racing and for rodding came together with a business purpose,” said SEMA President and CEO Chris Kersting, who knew Wells for 20 years. “He spent most of his professional career devoted to things that would further the sport, the hobby and the business that supported the automotive enthusiast.”

Wells took his early positions and experience with Peterson Publishing Co., for instance, and turned them into the force with which he co-launched the first SEMA Show in 1960. As the hot rodding, street rodding hobby and industry grew, Wells remained a prominent personality, leading the National Street Rod Association, serving as SEMA’s executive director, and sitting on the NHRA board of directors, among other positions.

An NHRA biography details his numerous awards: He earned SEMA’s Person of the Year award in1977 and was inducted into the association’s Hall of Fame in 1993. The International Specialty Car Association gave him its Founder’s Award in 1994, and he received the Street Rod Marketing Alliance Industry Recognition Award in 1996 and an NHRA Pioneers Award in 2001.

Still, Kersting said Wells’ lasting impression isn’t in those awards, but in the evidence of how he lived and worked. “He was also one of those people who reached out and served as a mentor,” he said. “I had a number of people contact me after his passing to say ‘He was the reason I got into this business.’”

Hot rodding icon and SEMA Show co-founder Alex Xydias met Wells when they both worked at Peterson. “I think Dick’s most important contribution probably came in the pioneering of the sport of drag racing and promotion of the automotive hobby,” Xydias said.

But again, there was more: “He left behind an expertise everywhere he went that helped whatever organization he was working with,” Xydias said. “With everything he did, when he left and went on to a new challenge, he left behind a lot of stuff that bettered that organization. He improved every group he ever worked with.”